To become a leader in any field, specialisation is obligatory. The risk of spreading oneself too thin is drilled into those with multiple interests. “You cannot hunt two hares at the same time,” the chemist Nikolay Zinin said to a young Alexander Borodin, one of classical music’s better known moonlighters, about his pursuits in both music and chemistry. Nevertheless, driven perhaps by passion or by financial need, classical music has produced some famous multidisciplinarians - here is a list of classical music’s ten best moonlighters.
1 Alexander Borodin – chemist
Alexander Borodin’s music (such as his String Quartet No 2 and Prince Igor) gained him recognition as one of “The Five”, a circle of nationalist Russian composers that included Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky. However, Borodin was primarily a chemist. In 1872, he co-discovered the Aldol reaction (a method of forming carbon-carbon bonds). He is also credited as being one of the earliest researchers to link high cholesterol with heart disease.
2 Philip Glass – cab driver and plumber
Philip Glass, best known as an early pioneer of minimalist music, supported himself until his early 40s by working as a plumber and cab driver. Even after the 1976 premier of Einstein on the Beach, and despite his burgeoning success, he continued to ply his trade, leading to often amusing encounters. For instance, art critic Robert Hughes, whose dishwasher Glass was installing, recognised him and allegedly exclaimed: “But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?”
3 Ethel Smyth – writer
The work of Dame Ethel Smyth – composer and suffragette – has often been subject to neglect despite the admiration it won from her contemporaries, including Tchaikovsky and Debussy. The Wreckers is often lauded as one of the most important English operas. In her later life, however, she took to writing and penned ten books, including polemics, autobiographies and biographies. Virginia Woolf, a known advocate of Smyth’s writing, wrote in a letter to her in 1931: “You have Style … It’s the flight and droop of the sentence; where the accent falls, the full stop. Ah, how beautifully you wing your way from phrase to phrase!”
4 Ignacy Jan Paderewski – prime minister of Poland
Pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski enjoyed global success as a musician, becoming a household name after writing his Minuet in G for piano. His opera Manru is the only opera by a Polish composer to have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Paderewski was also very active in politics and was a fierce champion of Polish independence. In 1919, at the height of his musical success, he became the prime minister and foreign minister of Poland and represented Poland at the Paris Peace Conference.
5 John Cage – visual artist
John Cage, pioneer of the prepared piano and avant-garde composer of works such as 4’33”, often employed chance methods (such as dice and the I Ching) when composing. He aimed to eliminate the role of the composer and, consequently, the interference of subjectivity and human intention on music. Towards the end of his life, using these same chance techniques, Cage created a large body of critically acclaimed visual art, including prints and paintings.
6 Olivier Messiaen – ornithologist
Olivier Messiaen’s ornithological research was intrinsic to his music making. Over his lifetime, he transcribed a huge array of birdsong, building an impressive archive, its level of accuracy owed to his hypersensitive hearing and its global reach achieved through his travels and extended by fans of his work, who sent him audio samples. His legacy simultaneously enlightens on the music of nature – for which he provided an extensive catalogue – and of nature in music.
7 St Hildegard of Bingen – mystic and writer on science and medicine
More than 70 pieces of music from the 12th century by St Hildegard of Bingen survive; her musical output is one of the largest among medieval composers. Her work pushed the boundaries of monophonic monastic chant of the time and is characterised by its soaring melodies. Hildegard was a known polymath. She wrote extensively on science and preventative and diagnostic medicine and was the first person to identify the importance of boiling drinking water to prevent disease. She is best known as a mystic and as author of three volumes detailing and analysing her visions. She was beatified in the 16th century, but for reasons relating to the complications of Vatican bureaucracy, not canonised until 2012.
8 Iannis Xenakis – architect
Iannis Xenakis, an innovator of electronic music and of the use of mathematical theories in composition, aimed to free music from western scales and to reinvent the musical landscape entirely to fit a postwar world. He was also a talented architect, becoming one of Le Corbusier’s chief designers, and wrote extensively on the links between music and architecture. Xenakis based the design of the Philips Pavilion, built for Expo ’58 in Brussels, on the graphic score created for his 1953/54 composition, Metastaseis.
9 Lera Auerbach – writer and visual artist
Russian-American composer Lera Auerbach has produced a catalogue of more than 100 works, including opera, ballet, orchestral and choral works and chamber music. She is also a respected poet in Russia (her poetry has yet to be published in English), a novelist and a visual artist who has exhibited internationally. For her 2011 opera, Gogol (for which she also wrote the libretto), she produced some oil paintings, two of which were exhibited and sold in Moscow.
10 William Herschel – astronomer
William Herschel’s extensive musical output of more than 100 works included 24 symphonies, 14 concertos and numerous pieces for solo keyboard and violin. He also enjoyed a successful career as a performer, playing violin, cello, oboe, organ and harpsichord. However, Herschel is most remembered for his work as an amateur astronomer, which led him to the discovery of Uranus in 1781, as well as the moons of Uranus, two moons of Saturn and infrared radiation. Herschel, often hailed as the father of modern astronomy, also coined the term “asteroid” and has a crater on the moon, a basin on Mars, a space observatory and much more named after him.
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